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A Brief Review of Epic Universe

Universal newest theme park is like no other they’ve done, and is well, frankly, Epic

And you thought there would never be a post here again. I apologize for the long absence, but the years since grad school have been both fortunately and unfortunately extremely occupied with work.

So let’s cut right to the chase, I recently had the opportunity to visit Universal’s newest park, Epic Universe, and boy howdy hey – in short, it lives up to its name.

Experiencing Epic was a fascinating new experience in the modern age – never before have I gotten to experience a brand new park that also I’d been able to observe the construction of on an almost daily basis. A very surreal combo of knowing exactly what to expect, but also not knowing much of anything. But despite having that intimate familiarity, the park proved to be constantly full of surprises and dramatically different than where my expectations had been set.

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The Big Break Foundation: Experts at Relational Experience Design

You never forget your first IAAPA. Between the thousands of flashing lights, the mixture of Dippin’ Dots and fog juice wafting through the air, and the slow building sensation that this must be what war is like —  it can be a lot. I first attended IAAPA over half a decade ago and that experience, while memorable, I can’t say was exactly positive. It was overwhelming, confusing, and surprisingly lonely. I left unsure if I even belonged in this industry. That experience could not stand in more contrast to my most recent IAAPA experience in November, in no small part thanks to the stellar work of the Big Break Foundation. 

The Big Break Foundation was founded a couple years ago, at the height of the global pandemic, by themed entertainment industry veterans Chuck Fawcett and Patrick Kling. Run by executive director Monai Rooney, the organization seeks to improve inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility throughout the location-based industry. But from where I stand what the organization really excels at is relational experience design. It looks at the entire industry from above, and in a truly innovative way focuses on both the guest experience and that of the behind-the-scenes talent and identifies ways to improve the experience for everyone, regardless of where they exist in the system. 

The Edutainment program is a perfect case study of this approach. I, along with 49 other students and recent graduates, from writers to mechanical engineers, from college sophomores to mid-career transitioners, and people from all over the country and world found ourselves on a whirlwind immersion program into the attractions industry. All of us had stories of barriers that we kept encountering: lost internship opportunities due to the pandemic that we were no longer eligible for, convoluted international visa requirements and companies unwilling to deal with them, possessing odd combinations of skillsets, unsure how to communicate our value. And over the course of the week I glimpsed a shocking amount of opportunities begin to unfold and the edges of some of the barriers begin to be sanded off.

Throughout most of the history of the themed entertainment industry, making your way in it has been rather difficult. It’s a career that people fall into through luck or who otherwise have had to navigate a dark maze of unmarked doors through sometimes dubious means. It’s often been a hostile climate: people forced to trudge forward for long hours in pain and discomfort with no map, not sure of where they’re going, where only the most obsessively driven, competitive, and frankly, privileged succeed. In short, it’s a place where most of the effort of experience design has been placed on the product, not on the halls where it’s created. But it doesn’t have to be that way and a new generation is looking to change that. Most pros that have been in the themed entertainment industry a while accept that the better the guest experience is the more money there is to be made. People want to be in places that are great to be in. What the Big Break Foundation recognizes is that axiom holds just as true behind the scenes. 

The core of the Edutainment Program is a partnership with IAAPA that provides admission to the IAAPA Expo, EDUSessions, and a 1-year Young Professional IAAPA membership for free, to each of the 50 participants. That alone is huge. Tickets to the Expo are not cheap and the learning and networking opportunities contained within are invaluable. But Big Break goes way beyond basic access and curates an entire weeklong experience, a crucial component of which is community. A newcomer’s first exposure to this industry can often be formidable and isolating. As program participant and industrial designer Gabriel Nunez explains, “At times I felt out of place…a sense of alienation crushed me. How could I join the industry when I come from middle-of-nowhere, Costa Rica?…I found comfort in the rest of the Edutainment Pass Program participants…Thanks to all of them, I ended up feeling like I do belong, we all belong, no matter where we come from.” The Edutainment program combats the isolation of being new by curating a community before the expo begins, with online discussions and multiple meetings, so even on Day 1 you feel just a little less alone. 

Once the expo does start, the program, this year run by the incomparable production manager Sara Needham and sponsored by B Morrow Productions, offers a treasure-trove of experiences that unlock IAAPA in ways 2016 me could never have imagined: Tours of the show floor from industry veterans happy to answer any question you can dream up. Nearly a dozen intimate discussions from even more industry experts happy to share their wisdom and chat one-on-one to answer questions. Schedules and directions to all the mixers and meetups you might not have even known were happening or existed. An invite to the Valtech party. And above all a community to do it with. 

One aspect I love about Big Break’s approach is its individualized, generous spirit. A spirit that flows directly from their focus on IDEA principles. Take for example Sara’s story. They were a participant in the program last year and because of it were able to land an internship with one their top choice companies, but alas there have been additional barriers. 

“Being a international graduate student has meant finding full-time employment comes with the added requirement of visa sponsorship…this extra requirement has made my own personal search very difficult. After my internship ended I reached out to Monai and Big Break Foundation to see if there was any way I could volunteer my time while looking for my next opportunity…Big Break gave me a focus, a chance to build some new skills…I became the point of contact for these students [and 33 industry professionals who spoke to them], building an exclusive Edutainment Program schedule for their IAAPA week…sourcing and scheduling chats…organizing booth volunteers…even speaking to the media on behalf of Big Break Foundation. In a time where I couldn’t find my next step and wanted to give up, Big Break Foundation put me in a position to keep moving forward and serve my community.”

This generous, individualized spirit extends to everyone the foundation encounters. The Edutainment program regularly invites people it meets on the floor to relevant events and encourages participants to do the same, when the circumstances allow, because they recognize the goal is creating a better experience for everyone — lifting everyone up. The trailblazer chats were formed through requests of the participants, of people we  directly asked to hear from. And Monai and Sara both make it a point to get to know every participant by name, learn what they want to do, and try to connect them with the people that can make it happen: an attitude quickly mirrored by all the attendees.

Of course the Big Break Foundation knows that there are so many more people out there that could use a hand than the 50 they’re currently able to sponsor. In fact, the Edutainment program is only a small portion of the work they do throughout the industry to try to create a welcoming experience for everyone. This is where their relational experience design expertise comes in. The Big Break Foundation goes beyond quick fixes, and even beyond the model of guest service, to the very core of how experiences are created: how we relate to each other, our environments, and the structures we operate within. Through the principles of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility, the Big Break Foundation seeks to transform the guest and employee experience alike into something better for all. 

I don’t think a lot of people recognize the mental toll being a newcomer, being marginalized, or just having rotten luck can take on a person trying to make their way. Nunez talks a bit about this, “I applied because not many believed in my dreams of becoming a ride designer when I was kid. I applied to show there’s people outside the US with ambition and talent willing to give it their all to become part of this industry. I applied so that one day another student with similar aspirations can look back and see that our voices can be just as strong as anybody else’s. That no matter the barriers that being queer Latinos pose, we will make it.” Many of us in the program have dealt with the lack of confidence being on the outside can bring. I feel echoes of Gabriel’s journey in my own story. One of the reasons I’m pursuing a career in themed entertainment now and not 15 years ago is because as a closeted trans teen I was bullied for loving theme parks, faced with homophobic derision about it, and didn’t have the confidence to say “this is what I want.” Much like Gabriel I hope that my presence now might help some other person who feels afraid to go after what they want. IDEA principles and the relational experience design expertise Big Break provides help cultivate an atmosphere where people like us can feel we belong.

People often get scared or defensive when the IDEA words pop up. Such big aspirations must mean a big change. Change is scary. And sure there is no denying there’s a lot to work on. But really it’s just about helping people: about being kind, generous, welcoming, and curious. It’s about being as intentional in crafting the experiences between each other as we are in creating the ones made out of concrete and steel. To make room for everyone, as the monorail announcement goes.

All week I heard story after story about the opportunities this approach was able to unlock for my peers. Wren Sullivan, another participant and concept artist puts it well, “Applying for Big Break Foundation is one of the most beneficial things I’ve done. All of their fireside chats with industry professionals really gave me the opportunity to understand the industry more, network on a closer basis, and reconfirm that this is the industry for me…I was overwhelmed by the amount of networking that happened amongst all of the Big Break Foundation scholarship receivers.” Matthew Curnutte, participant and mechanical engineer echoes the sentiment, “I’m so glad I got selected. I got way more out of IAAPA Expo through Big Break Foundation than I would have going on my own. “

Big Break asks, “what if we paid as much attention to the experience between each other as we did to the one in Revit?” What if there were people around every corner looking to make your journey just a tad more easy and pleasant, one where you’re given a map and aren’t stuck in line, so that you can save your energy for the actual job. Big Break gives new tools to improve the guest experience in ways that have been historically overlooked and for the first time applies the techniques of great experience design to behind the scenes creators, operators, and those that aspire to become them. It does this by being holistic, by not focusing on one individual detail or demographic, but by focusing on how all the elements work together, just as the best experience designers do, to make a seamless experience for everyone. I feel so grateful to have gotten to be a part of their Edutainment program this year, and so excited by the energy I witnessed among my fellow participants. There’s so much fantastic talent on the horizon and Big Break Foundation is making all of our journeys a better experience.

What is Themed Entertainment?

I have an exciting announcement to make. I’ve created a class! What is Themed Entertainment? In this lecture we explore the industry, what makes it tick, and how storytelling in this medium differs from others. We also explore exactly why it is experiences can be stories, and what stories themselves are, and why plot is not strictly necessary. This class helps fill a gap I’ve found in the industry, even in academic programs, where there just isn’t enough discussion about how exactly the medium itself works and why it works. If you’re brand new to the industry or a dedicated fan or just someone who wants an additional perspective that hopefully will help connect all the dots, this is for you! Let me know what you think!

The Fallacy of Immersion

Immersion has been the buzzword of the themed entertainment industry for a little over a decade or so. We’re in an arms race where every new project attempts to one-up the last by increasing the ‘immersiveness’ by another factor. Bigger, more enveloping, more detailed, and especially: more real. 

While some of the projects this has resulted in are phenomenal achievements, and indeed some of my personal favorites, I really find it peculiar that realism has become so centered in the process. In fact, ‘immersive’ and ‘real’ are often treated as if they’re synonymous and thus to make something more ‘immersive’ necessarily means you must make it more ‘real’. But one only needs a cursory understanding of operations to realize that realism and guests’ wants and needs are often in direct conflict with each other.

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On being trans in 2022.

So this is not going to be a post about themed entertainment. However, queer people are found way more in the entertainment industry than elsewhere, and that’s something to think about. To be quite honest, this isn’t a post I foresaw myself making even all that long ago. I was going to wait until trans day of visibility, but even waiting an extra month seems too long. Being a trans woman is not something I have ever particularly wanted to be the first thing people know about me, but in light of the state of the world, and particularly the state of the United States, I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable being any degree of quiet about it. Because by not being vocal about it, I’m unable to be as vocal about trans rights as I want to be. And right now there is a veritable shit storm of things to be vocal about. 

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What Sondheim Can Teach Us About Experience Design

Photo Credit: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.html

Stephen Sondheim, famed musical theatre composer, lyricist, genius, and a personal idol of mine recently passed away. His death has recently caused me to reexamine a thought I’ve had from time to time: that rides are akin to songs.

It might sound a bit strange at first to suggest that rides and songs are the most closely related storytelling mediums but consider their raw components. Music at its most basic level, stripped of lyrics, is a progression of sensations you feel. Rides at their most basic level, stripped of plot, are a progression of sensations that you feel. A simple unadorned coaster might be the equivalent of a single melodic line, one surrounded by scenery the equivalent of a full symphony: full of color, texture, and harmony. Both use these sensations to shape an arc of emotion within you — to tell stories. This is different than most movies, plays, books, and (many) games — which primarily use dialogue, plot, and prose. Those forms of storytelling speak to your mind. Music and experiences instead speak directly to your body. 

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Theme Park Musing #12 – Experience is in the Present, Story is Not

Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about. Most forms of story are inherently past-tense when you start looking at them with an experiential lens. When we talk about movies, the written word, and even most live performances – they’re past tense…even if they’re written or staged as if they’re in the present tense. If I read a book written in the present tense…like obviously those words aren’t appearing in front of me in the actual present. Presumably the book is a log of some kind that might have been written contemporaneously, but it still exists in the past. The present tense narration is merely a storytelling tool to make it feel more engaging. Same with future tense, though who the hell tells stories in the future tense.

But experiences INHERENTLY happen in the present. They cannot happen in the past, and they can’t happen in the future. They happen NOW. What exists in the future or the past is the STORY about that experience. I have an experience and then when I remember it my brain recreates it my head based on a STORY that it has constructed in the immediate aftermath. 

What this means is that when you’re storytelling for experiences, what you’re really doing is creating proto-stories. You can’t tell a story in the present, because the act of “telling” it puts it in the past. It put distance between the events and the participant. So if you’re trying to create an immersive story what you really have to does supply the building blocks of the story, the raw experience, and supply them in such a way that the story you want to tell will be created in the audience’s mind later.

That’s what experiences are like in real life. You get dropped into a situation, maybe with some prior knowledge, and have to piece together a narrative after the fact. In the present the narrative isn’t necessarily clear. That’s what makes you feel immersed and in the moment. Otherwise any attempt to make an experience is going to feel like “hey remember this other thing?” Or “hey look at these pieces of art”

What this means in practice is difficult to pinpoint, it’s not just as simple as “don’t explain things” or “there is no story”. Even people who are really good at doing it can have trouble doing it on a consistent basis. It’s not how the human brain works. The human brain makes stories and narrative out of everything it sees. The human brain doesn’t remember reality. It remembers the story about the reality. The task of the experience designer is to remember a story of some experience that happened to them, and then work backwards and ACTUALLY remember the pieces of reality that built that experience, so the story can be literally recreated for someone else, not just told to them. And of course it’s extra difficult because you’re not remembering at all, you’re trying to create something new. In some respects this is what “attention to detail” means in an experiential context.

When Marc Davis said his quote about theme park designers not telling stories, but creating arcs of experience, he was sorta right. The reason he didn’t think they were telling stories is because at that time the designers didn’t necessarily pursue storytelling with the kind of intentionality that a lot of us want to pursue today. Or they just told very, very archetypal stories. But they were doing it intuitively. (Which tbh is somewhat of a blessing, because approaching it with a specific outcome in mind makes the task a hell of a lot harder). And honestly the best attractions are clearly the ones where the designers were able to just tap into intuition and just flow. But I think it’s still useful to know what’s actually happening, so you internalize it. Like jazz music.

TL;DR I think the takeaway is that in order for something to feel immersive it needs to feel like “This is happening NOW.”  This is why rides that are environmental, with good transitions and a sense of actual space feel more immersive because the experience is plausibly happening in real time NOW. As opposed to being set pieces that we’re gliding past. And rides  that are more vignette-like and still good tend to be non-fiction or feature a lot of narration to tie it together (but not narration that just tells you what you’re looking at, narration that comments on the action instead). This is why experiences that don’t require you to pretend to be someone else feel more immersive, because there’s a sense of this is happening NOW vs this is an experience I’m entering. How much distance is there between me the guest and the actual physical elements of the story? Is this happening NOW and is this happening TO ME.

This is why creating elaborate backstories of a place can be a useful design tool. But only as a design tool. There are other ways to do it, particularly if you’re working on a small team, but if you’re working on a big team and want to create the building blocks of experience  that will add up to the story you want, you can create elaborate detailed backstories for every building and their inhabitants, stories that all relate to your big theme, and then the design of those buildings will reflect those stories, and then in theory those details will get reconstructed back in the audiences mind in roughly the way you intend. But the minute you start actually saying to the audience “here’s the baker’s house and the candlestick maker’s house” you actually end up shooting yourself in the foot, lodging your experience in the past and not the now. This is only one way to approach the problem, set dressers on films will essentially do the same process but its much more intuitive, quick, and less formalized. The main reason to formalize it though is in experience design teams can often large and hastily added details are a lot rarer – most need to be predesigned and built out of solid steel. 

I think this post is at the risk of soon rambling off and contradicting itself if it goes on too much longer, so I’ll stop here. It’s still a little hard to articulate. What I’m trying to get at is that story creation for experiences is indeed different than like writing a movie or novel. It’s a rawer form with less connecting tissue. And the impulse to provide too much connecting tissue can really do it a disservice. 

Note: I’m pretty sure Joe Rohde has said something partially to this effect, especially re creating the building blocks of story and not actually story, but twitter and Instagram are the opposite of conducive to searching for this.

Theme Park Musing #11 – What Actually is Themed Entertainment?

I’m starting to think that “good” themed entertainment design is actually a combination of two distinct design philosophies that are actually separate, just tend to occur together.

One is like themed entertainment design “proper”. Perhaps Narrative Design is a good word? This is the art of imbuing narrative and story and values into the built world.

But there’s also the philosophy of experience design, though that term has been so co-opted by UX people I think I need to distinguish it as like “radical holistic experience design” or “emotion design” or something.

And when we think about traditional theme park/themed entertainment design we’re really talking about those two things combining together. A theme park is a place that has been designed to tell stories about the world and reflect a value system back at us, but also meticulously crafted to create as frictionless an experience as possible, with specific guest emotions and states of being in mind.

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World Building: Themed Experiences are Tools of Social Change

Sparkling lights, cheery music, the smell of popcorn, cotton candy, and crisp churros floating through the air — bright colors, immersive worlds, elaborate spectacles from dawn past dusk. This is the imagery that’s conjured up when theme parks and other immersive experiences are discussed: fun, frivolity, and above all a disconnection from the real world. 

Some topics that probably don’t come to mind? Infrastructure, transportation policy, civic planning, technological development, history curriculums, gender politics, race relations, and a myriad of other issues normally reserved for some domed building far, far away.

There is a widespread belief that theme parks and related experiences are simply repositories of fun, devoid of politics. But that notion is simply not complete. Themed experiences are absolutely fun, entertaining places where people go to decompress. But they also play a gigantic role in shaping culture. These experiences are the physical repositories of our shared histories, mythologies, hopes and dreams. They are physical models that the world outside the berm looks to for inspiration. 

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